Mennonite Choral Music Recordings of the West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir

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Mennonite Choral Music Recordings of the West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir Jonathan Dueck Mennonites, an Anabaptist Protestant group, practice diverse repertoires of music both in and out of church, but in Canada, as Doreen Klassen has noted, they are best known for their “fine choral singing” (1988:3–4). In this essay, I will review all thirteen recordings of the British Columbia–based West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir (WMCC), a widely available set of recordings of Mennonite choral music. I will also refer to other recordings of choral and vocal music, Mennonite and otherwise, that form a point of comparison with WMCC’s recordings. This essay is not a comprehensive overview of Mennonite choral recordings in and out of print, nor is it a disinterested summary of Mennonite musical trends as they are embodied in recordings. Situated in my own experience as a lifelong Mennonite choral practitioner, it is an attempt to introduce readers to Mennonite choral singing using WMCC’s recordings as a lens for viewing the varied terrain of Mennonite musical practice and, to a lesser degree, Mennonite history. Mennonites trace their religious and musical origins to two groups of sixteenth-century Anabaptists, one in Switzerland and the other in the Netherlands. The early Anabaptists rebaptized each other in defiance of the state and the established church, reclaiming what they saw as the apostolic order of a church of equal disciples or a “priesthood of all believers.”1 Mennonites, one of several religious groups that emerged from these early Anabaptists, fled persecution and, using several different routes, followed promises of land to Eastern Europe and North America, arriving in North America between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, many Russian (originally Dutch) and Swiss Mennonite groups altered their earliest musical practices. From lined-out hymns, in which a leader begins (or “lines out”) a melody and all singers subsequently join in on that single melody, they transitioned to four-part hymns, in which each singer sings one of four distinct and simultaneous parts, usually notated in a hymnal. Most nineteenth- and twentieth-century hymns, as well as many pieces of choral music, are notated in four parts. This musical texture (manner of organizing parts in an ensemble) is usually called “SATB,” with each letter indicating a part from highest to lowest: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. The choirs and singing schools that were the institutional framework for this transition reflected the musical cultures surrounding Mennonites, including those of American gospel music and Romantic German classical choral music, repertoires that remain central for Mennonite choirs today (Berg 1985; Yoder 1958). “Romantic” is used here to refer to the Romantic period of Western classical music, that is, the nineteenth century; it also refers to the use of vibrato and large dynamic contrasts (contrasts of loud versus soft sounds) that are commonly associated with nineteenth-century German choral music. One way to understand the adoption of these musical practices is as an accommodation of the European-descended “ethnic Mennonites” to the larger societies that surrounded them (McCormack 1997). But Mennonite identities and musics are by no means limited to these repertoires. The already complex set of Mennonite identities and musical practices emerging from multiple religious diasporas increased exponentially through missions in the twentieth century, since converts brought with them their own ethnic backgrounds and musical traditions (Driedger 1999:7–8). Mennonites are also participants in the post-1960s conflicts over worship music in the Anglophone Christian world, placing themselves [End Page 348] at various points along a continuum of practice from increasingly professionalized classical music (Berg 1988) to both charismatic Christian and secular popular music (Dueck 2005; Schmidt 1990). Mennonite music making takes place in many contexts, including the concert hall, the church, Mennonite schools and camps, festivals connected to any of these institutions, the home, and popular-music venues. Mennonite choral singing, then, is of interest not only for its virtuosic, warm, romantic sounds but also for the stories its songs tell— stories of origins and dislocation and of Mennonites’ relationship to broader North American society. As a result, recordings of Mennonite choral music might be of interest to those wishing to address questions about...